I heard it is not really good idea to work with class attributes directly, instead using setters and getters. Can somebody tell me why?
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I heard it is not really good idea to work with class attributes directly, instead using setters and getters. Can somebody tell me why?
Funnily enough the wikipedia article on this subject gives good guidance: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessor
In short, a class should use mutator methods (getters, setters etc) to validate the input before it is stored privately. Doing so ensures the class can always be relied upon elsewhere in the code.
By contrast, if the attribute is globably available, anybody could modify it. If you have, for example, a string that needs to be a specific format and somebody adds a value that isn’t correct, bugs may result.